A Mathematical Model Considering Multi-skilled Operators and Industrial Robots on Reconfigurable Manufacturing Cells

Abstract

AbstractA sustainable reconfigurable manufacturing system is one of the most important topics concerning sustainability. Basically, the reconfigurable manufacturing systems have two streams. One is the machine-intensive and the other is the labour-intensive. The machine-intensive means a cell formation problem (CFP) or a reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS). On the other hand, the labour-intensive means a cellular manufacturing (CM) or a Cell Production System (CPS). Almost all manufacturing sites have these assembly lines separately, however, some advanced manufacturing sites have adopted both CM and CPS in order to absorb variability of demand and operators under the environment of limited multi-skilled operators. When the operators are replaced by industrial robots in the real world, they are called robotic cells and focused as an important component of the cyber-physical system in the large number of recent papers. Therefore, this paper tackles to indicate a multi-period mixed integer programming model to solve simultaneously 2-type cell systems considering multi-skilled operators and industrial robots on reconfigurable manufacturing cells sustainably. Firstly, the traditional model is redefined by new parameters. Secondly, the proposed model is solved by 2-phase optimization problems. Finally, the proposed model is compared with the traditional model by using numerical experiments.